By WILLIAM ARNOLD, P-I MOVIE CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, September 20, 2007

According to the Hollywood trade papers, Jessica Alba is the one young actress who has such a devoted following among testosterone-soaked young moviegoers that she can single-handedly turn a bad movie like "Into the Blue" into a box-office hit.

Her new vehicle, "Good Luck Chuck," may challenge that gift. It tries to be a sappy love story, an incredibly vile gross-out comedy and an envelope-pushing soft-core porno movie all at once. It ends up being an unappealing abomination.

Opening with a prologue that probably could be prosecuted under kiddie-porn statutes, it tells the story of a dentist (Dane Cook) suffering a curse that has made him wildly popular with single women: anyone who sleeps with him meets their true love the next day.

When he falls for a cute biologist (Alba), the joke is he doesn't want to sleep with her since, if he does, she will soon fall in love with someone else. So, as much as he'd like to have sex with her, he has to go to great lengths to avoid being intimate.

Meanwhile, he's having sex with all those women who want to take advantage of his curse (often in split screen, so we see him having intercourse with a dozen women at once); while his best pal (Dan Fogler) is copulating with grapefruits and talking about eating excrement.

As Cook's performance becomes progressively hammy, the jokes get more desperately scatological and the love story moves to its preordained end. The movie's only saving grace is Alba, who has a sexy-angelic quality that the camera loves.

But Alba fans take note: of the multitude of bare breasts being flashed throughout this movie, none of them seem to belong to the star.